Being unjust

[Paul Boddie]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> skip at pobox.com writes:
> > That's the rub though.  There are lots of ways to approach web app
> > frameworks.  They all have their pros and cons.  Deciding on one to ship
> > with Python will likely be a significant challenge.

There are lots of ways to approach a full Web application architecture,
but down at the bottom of the stack there isn't exactly too much
variation in what goes in and what comes out. Unfortunately, the debate
on request and response objects trespassed on the territory of what
existing frameworks do, and things like whether get_fields should
return a mixture of GET and POST request parameters distracted from
standardising on something. (Hint: at the bottom of the stack, you
don't want magic stuff like parameter merging going on - leave that to
something else if someone finds it hard to break some PHP habit or
other.)

As I said in another response to this thread, WSGI did attempt a degree
of standardisation but only by avoiding most of the hard or contentious
issues: not a particularly great result of two years discussion, in my
opinion.

> There are maybe a half dozen plausible candidates.  The first thing to
> do is ask the authors whether they'd WANT their framework to be
> shipped with Python.  If exactly one says yes, that makes the choice simple.
> Either way, that question should narrow it down some.

I don't understand why people want the python to swallow some
hippopotamus whole. The "winner takes all" (ie. "now everyone will
submit to my favourite framework - it is the one true way!") attitude
is precisely what keeps any kind of progress permanently stalled. I can
understand why people want GvR to make a pronouncement just to move the
debate forward (or rather to kill the debate and conjure up a result),
but such a pronouncement is more likely to result in yet another Zope
situation: there's the "one true way" that increasing numbers of people
object to, and then there's the chaos alongside it that has always been
there.

Paul